Ancient Rome

Having spent two months on Ancient Rome, we are moving on to Ancient African Civilizations. But, as I have done with our other big history projects, I want to share an outline of what we covered. So, here's a summary of our journey through the fascinating history that took us from seven villages on some hills to the birth of the Republic, then through the emperors and on to the collapse of the great Roman Empire.

One of our main resources was this book on Ancient Rome from our collection of Dorling Kindersley's Eyewitness Books.

I got a bunch of these books on different civilizations, and so far Lu's read the ones on Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and now Rome. The bite-sized chunks of information don't go into great depth, but Lu enjoys reading them. They're packed with beautiful pictures, and definitely help us imagine what life was like then.

This Site: Kids'Past.com is our central history resource.

It has many grammatical errors, and some dates were off, but on the whole, it's a very easy-to-read, straightforward world history paper. So, I edited the whole thing - from prehistoric humans to the Industrial Revolution (yes, I'm slightly OCD) - and turned it into a document formatted to our liking (picture size, font size, etc.) so that we wouldn't be dependent on internet signal (which is unreliable here), and to avoid having to look at the ads on the website.

We usually read 4 or 5 picture-full pages, discuss, and write. We're doing so much writing in history that I've decided to skip grammar as a separate class, and just include it in our history sessions. 

The writing consists of formulating questions and answers to what we just read. After coming up with a question, we focus on composing the answer. 

So, we'll usually read a couple paragraphs, discuss, write, continue reading, discuss, write some more, and so forth... 

 We use Wikipedia and other websites, like this one, 

to read more and to cross-reference.

We also do a timeline at the end of almost every lesson.

Here, Lu's making a comparative timeline
between Greece and Rome.

Documentaries, as always, played a huge part in our learning:

History Channel's Engineering an Empire, 

the Rome and Carthage episodes

Nat Geo's Julius Caesar, The Roman Empire

BBC's The Rise and Fall of Hannibal 

and

Nat Geo's Jesus, The Man  

(which was accompanied by our studies on Christianity)

Lu created a Word document as his final project.

 Apart from a few minor suggestions,

Lu did this all by himself!